Especially in northern Europe, a black-letter style of increasing density deepened the colour of the page and imparted to this formal book hand the appearance of woven fabric, giving rise to its generic name of textura. In some books the more formal black-letter looks stiff and narrow, and the lines forming the letters attain the perfect regularity of a picket fence; the rigidity is relieved only by hairlines made with the corner of the square-cut nib, which add a playful note to an otherwise sombre hand. During the 13th and 14th centuries the black-letter scripts became quite small in some manuscripts, especially Bibles, such that 10 or more lines of writing might fit in an inch (2.5 cm).
Black-letter book hand by Jacobus de Voragine, from his Legenda aurea, 1312; in the British Museum, London (Add. 11,882).Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum
Paleographers have distinguished four types of black-letter (textualis) styles that were used in Germany, France, England, and Italy: prescissa, quadrata, semi-quadrata, and rotunda. Textualis precissa is identified by the way the bottoms (feet) of several of the minims end horizontally above the writing line. The feet of the minims of textualis quadrata are made up of diamond shapes, and they match the serifs found at their tops. Quadrata was used for early German printing types (e.g., the Gutenberg Bible) and became widely used in both type and calligraphy, although the precissa was an earlier and more elegant letter form. In Italy rotunda was the favoured book hand through the 15th century. It shares the dense colour of quadrata but not its angularity. Rotunda letters are condensed with sharp curves where the strokes change direction, and the feet of the minims end with an upward curve of the pen. Unlike quadrata, which spread throughout the printing community of northern Europe, rotunda had little influence on type design. Semi-quadrata, as the name implies, bears a close resemblance to quadrata but mixes that hand’s diamond-shaped foot serifs with the upwardly curved bottom terminals of rotunda.
Textus prescissus, "Beatus" page from the Tickhill Psalter, c. 1310; in the collection of the New York Public Library, New York City.Courtesy of the New York Public Library, the Spencer Collection, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
There are also cursive forms of black-letter scripts. One such style—used extensively in French vernacular books—is called cursiva bastarda, lettre bâtarde, or simply bâtarde, the word bastard indicating its mixed parentage of formal black letter and casual cursive script. Although the script is not truly cursive (there are several pen lifts within and between letters), the freedom with which it is written (e.g., in deluxe Burgundian manuscripts), the flaglike serifs on some ascenders, the fusion of adjacent curved shapes, the use of an uncial-style d, and the rightward slope of the letters f and long s give this hand a vivacity unrivaled by other black-letter styles. The less formal bastard secretary cursive, which slopes slightly to the right and features looped serifs on some ascenders, was equally at home in French and Flemish manuscripts of the late 14th and 15th centuries. The scripts of humanism (14th to 16th century)
Inspired by the 14th-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch—who is credited with starting the practice of collecting ancient Roman manuscripts, coins, medals, and other artifacts—the literary and philosophical movement called humanism engaged a group of scholars in Florence during the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Through literary and archaeological research they sought to restore what they believed was their lost heritage. Many of the manuscripts they found had been transcribed during the 9th through 12th centuries in Carolingian minuscules with titles in pen-made Roman capitals. The humanists believed mistakenly that these manuscripts originated in the ancient world and therefore that the writing styles in them were the scripts used by the ancient Romans. Reverently, Coluccio Salutati, the late 14th-century chancellor of Florence who followed Petrarch as leader of the movement, and his fellow humanists imitated the predominant old script, which they called lettera antica to distinguish it from the contemporary lettera moderna, a version of black-letter rotunda.
lettera anticaLettera antica, the minuscule script preferred by the humanists.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Two protégés of Salutati, Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò Niccoli, are credited with developing the fundamental writing styles of humanism based on the scripts found in Carolingian manuscripts. At the beginning of the 15th century, Poggio Bracciolini, a professional scribe, produced a round, formal humanist book hand that, after refinement by a generation of scribes, served as the prototype for “roman” type fonts. To the minuscules he added a pen-made style of square capitals similar to those seen on early Roman monuments for the majuscules, thereby linking the two disparate scripts.
Roman majusculeRoman majuscule.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Later in the 15th century the rage for epigraphic (inscriptional) lettering brought into the field such enthusiasts as Cyriacus of Ancona, Felice Feliciano and Giovanni Giocondo of Verona, and Giovanni Marcanova, Bartolomeo Sanvito, and Andrea Mantegna from Padua; Mantegna, an engraver and painter, became one of the first Renaissance artists to incorporate classical lettering into his artwork. These men compiled their researches into sillogi (anthologies of texts from Roman inscriptions) that provided models for square capital letters.
inscriptional calligraphyInscriptional calligraphy.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Feliciano, an antiquary, poet, scribe, printer, and alchemist, was the first person to attempt to demonstrate how monumental Roman capitals were constructed according to geometric rules. In a manuscript made by him between 1458 and 1469 (Vatican Library, Vat. Lat. 6852), Feliciano presents an inscriptional capital Roman alphabet, complete with the shadows formed by v-cut letters, along with rudimentary instructions on making these letters based on geometry. He used a straight edge and compass (devices not used by the ancient Romans), although some of the work is done freehand. Others would later pursue this geometric approach, well into the age of print—one of the best known proponents being the great German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer in the early 16th century.
The second influential style of humanistic script appeared in the writings of Poggio’s older friend Niccolò Niccoli, a scholar who was also an accomplished, though not a professional, scribe. His slightly inclined cursive, speedily written with a fairly narrow, somewhat blunt nib, was to inspire the printers’ italic type, just as Poggio’s hand led to their roman type. Niccoli’s cursive script was informal and useful, not primarily artistic. It is a rapidly written script that links most letters and shows few pen lifts. Some black-letter mannerism appears in the writing. This early italic is not nearly as condensed as its later descendants; the letters (e.g., o or n) are nearly as wide as they are tall, but the script looks narrower than it is because it has very tall ascenders and wide spaces between the lines of writing. If the text is viewed from a mapwise orientation (with north at the top), the pen is held at an angle that produces thick strokes on the southwest and northeast quarters of the letter o, with corresponding thin strokes on its northwest and southeast parts. As in most italic type fonts to the present day, the form of a is distinctive, as are f, g (double bowl), k (closed top), and ſ (long s), which are all more or less reminiscent of black-letter shapes. The capital letters are upright and in their Roman form. Poggio’s and Niccoli’s scripts were at once taken up by other scribes and scholars and spread throughout Italy in the first half of the 15th century.